[HN Gopher] Transcript of taped conversations among German nucle...
___________________________________________________________________
Transcript of taped conversations among German nuclear physicists
(1945)
Author : davidbarker
Score : 156 points
Date : 2023-08-01 16:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ghdi.ghi-dc.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (ghdi.ghi-dc.org)
| graycat wrote:
| WWII? The atom bombs on Japan? I tried to understand the history,
| causes, read the Richard Rhodes books, other books, watched
| documentaries and movies, etc.
|
| As I read this thread, I guess that it has more and better
| thinking about the issues of morality, ethics, various steps that
| could have been attempted with Japan, atomic weapons stopping
| wars, etc. than Truman considered when he decided to drop the
| bombs and conclude that Truman saw just two cases: (1) Drop
| atomic bombs, end the war within not many hours, and save lives
| of US soldiers. (2) Delay, attempt, look for alternatives and
| possibilities, negotiate, demonstrate, ..., and lose more US
| lives. So, he picked (1), and maybe he did it in less than 10
| minutes.
| bloak wrote:
| A minor point of pedantry (sorry, I can't help my obsession with
| textual criticism): these are not transcripts; they are
| translations. I think I read somewhere that transcripts were
| made, but they were lost. I find it odd that the introduction
| says nothing about that. On the other hand, the introduction
| doesn't really say anything much at all about the provenance of
| the text. Or perhaps it does and I didn't look hard enough. If
| anyone knows more, please reply.
| vibrio wrote:
| I don't think that is pedantry. Translations are
| interpretations by a third party that may or may not have an
| opinion on the topic.
| cameron_b wrote:
| > HEISENBERG said he could understand it because GERLACH was the
| only one of them who had really wanted a German victory, because
| although he realized the crimes of the Nazis and disapproved of
| them, he could not get away from the fact that he was working for
| GERMANY. HAHN replied that he too loved his country and that,
| strange as it might appear, it was for this reason that he had
| hoped for her defeat.
|
| This is the difference between Nationalism and Patriotism
| sdfghswe wrote:
| > WEIZSACKER: I think it's dreadful of the Americans to have done
| it. I think it is madness on their part.
|
| > HEISENBERG: One can't say that. One could equally well say
| "That's the quickest way of ending the war."
| mikewarot wrote:
| Without perspective, it's easy to say that the bomb shouldn't
| have been used. Once one learns of the other details of the
| war, and gains perspective, it's obvious that it was going to
| be used.
|
| We're still awarding the Purple Heart medals that were produced
| in vast quantities in WW2 in expectation of the invasion of
| Japan. (or so I've heard)
| ookdatnog wrote:
| I listened to this >2h essay about the atomic bombing over a
| year ago. I'm writing mostly from memory, so there might be
| errors in my summary.
|
| I think the argument was that the reason for the atomic
| bombing was not really a military necessity (fleet admirals
| Leahy and Nimitz at least seemed to think so). The Japanese
| were already signaling they were willing to surrender well
| before the bomb dropped -- but not yet _unconditionally_. The
| one condition they had was that the emperor had to stay in
| place and should not be punished for the war. The US could
| have chosen to accept this condition and end the war, but
| didn't for a variety of reasons (none of them military).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go
| InTheArena wrote:
| You are conflating two separate things. The Japanese were
| willing to stop hostilities before Nagasaki and Hiroshima,
| but only if they kept large chunks of China, the mandates,
| and Korea. In other words, only if their war gains and
| goals were recognized. After the bombing they were willing
| to surrender. Period. Contrary to popular myth, United
| States never made any formal guarantee that the emperor
| would stay in power. In fact, it was only because of
| MacArthur that he did so. All they committed to that
| allowed the Japanese to surrender with any minimal amount
| of face saving was re-iterating the long-held American
| position that people should choose their own government.
| mcenedella wrote:
| The Japanese were not willing to surrender even AFTER the
| 2nd bomb on Nagasaki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surre
| nder_of_Japan#Discussions...
|
| The War Council would not approve surrender.
|
| After the Emperor made his decision, there was a serious
| coup attempt to prevent surrender: https://en.m.wikipedia
| .org/wiki/Kyujo_incident#:~:text=The%2....
| throwaway290 wrote:
| It's still easy to say that the bombs shouldn't have been
| dropped, for one because it's a war crime and indiscriminate
| murder of civilians.
|
| Just ask what if a country that did it lost the war. People
| would probably be put to death just for this in Nuremberg.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > what if a country that did it lost the war
|
| That's not even a counterfactual. That's nonsense.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I might be misremembering but I think the ribbons are new but
| the medal itself is the original new ones
| croes wrote:
| But they used two bombs. Wouldn't one have been enough to end
| the war?
| gumby wrote:
| It's not even clear in retrospect; the minutes of the
| Imperial war cabinet show they were confused as to what was
| going on after the first bomb.
|
| Note that there was a third bomb scheduled and in
| preparation and it was decommissioned and returned to Los
| Alamos.
|
| Also note that the conventional bombing of Tokyo just a few
| months prior caused greater destruction and loss of life.
|
| Evaluations have to be made in context, which is very hard.
| There was a lot of anger and pain on both sides, which lead
| to irrational "momentum" in prosecution of war. Also there
| is the logic of industrial warfare: look at Europe: many
| smaller German cities were bombed for the first time just
| in the the last month of that war, because a huge machine
| had been switched on that just kept emitting planeloads of
| bombs which had to be dropped somewhere.
|
| There is a thoughtful discussion of this topic by Tooze
| from just a few days ago:
| https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-230-burning-
| hambu...
| jacquesm wrote:
| Dresden...
|
| The Germans did terrible things, but the allies
| definitely did not have the moral high ground on all
| fronts. This is for me the horror of war: that because of
| one side losing its humanity the other side will too.
| nvy wrote:
| Dresden was as legitimate a target as any other city. Its
| factories made, among other things, precision optics for
| bomb sights.
|
| Dresden being a purely civilian target is a myth.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, and precisely the large industrial areas of Dresden
| were not targeted but the inner city with lots of
| civilians was.
|
| Note that I have no love for Nazi Germany, my family
| suffered tremendously at their hands and the results of
| that are still felt today. At the same time: I am
| categorically against indiscriminate firebombing of
| cities leading to 20K+ civilian deaths and if you feel
| that those civilians were a legitimate target because
| they happened to be in the city then you and I are
| probably not going to have a very productive discussion.
| nvy wrote:
| There were military factories in the city center also.
|
| What I'm saying Jacques, is that the issue is nuanced. I
| encourage you to read Frederick Taylor's excellent book
| on the subject.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've read that already (note: history is written by the
| victors) as well as a whole pile of other books on war
| (WWI, WWII) and ethics, rules of engagement and so on. My
| takeaway is that _if_ you want to be able to take the
| moral high ground as a nation state you play by the rules
| even if that gives you a disadvantage on the off chance
| that you win the war. Because if you do you will end up
| with a more broken world than the one that you had before
| and now you have no tools to fix it without being labeled
| a hypocrite. This is all pretty complex stuff and not
| worthy of treatment by comment (books would be more
| appropriate) but that 's how I feel about it and I don't
| think that it is going to be a trivial affair to move me
| from that position.
|
| It also informed my stance on how I perceive war and my
| own possible role in it: I would definitely find myself
| mobilized (financially, personally) to help defend
| countries that are overrun by obvious aggressors,
| including my own but I would under no circumstance allow
| myself to be roped into a war of aggression up to the
| point where I would be happy to go to prison or worse if
| it came to it. This is not trivial stuff and I have so
| far been fortunate enough not to have seen this put to
| the test in a practical sense.
|
| I know Dresden was not a purely civilian target, but
| civilians were fairly explicitly targeted, either that or
| you'd have to chalk that all up to extreme sloppiness,
| which is not a case that anybody credible has ever made.
| nvy wrote:
| >I know Dresden was not a purely civilian target
|
| I feel like we're pretty much on the same page, then.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| How many would be civilians who were drafted to be
| soldiers are you willing to sacrifice so that you don't
| kill 'civilians'? If you are talking professional armies
| it is one argument, but when you are talking civilians
| that have been dragged into a conflict their nation did
| not start are they 100% not-civilian simply because of
| circumstance? Being a drafted non-aggressor army should
| also be part of the consideration in my mind.
| jacquesm wrote:
| We're talking about people that were at zero risk to be
| drafted as soldiers. You can put civilians in quotes but
| these were _actual_ civilians. Boys too young to be
| drafted, women, girls, babies... Targeting them was a
| huge mistake, especially because that ordnance could have
| been put to far better use a few kilometers away, 30
| seconds flying time.
| ptx wrote:
| Are there any "pure" civilian targets then, or is
| absolutely anything a legitimate military target? Was
| that pizzeria in Kramatorsk a legitimate military target
| because, as Russia claimed, soldiers were among those
| eating there?
| nvy wrote:
| >Are there any "pure" civilian targets then, or is
| absolutely anything a legitimate military target?
|
| Welcome to the fundamental ethical dilemma underlying the
| debate around the Total War concept.
|
| I don't claim to have all the answers.
| krapp wrote:
| I think the debate as such is around insurgent warfare,
| where you're not fighting organized, unformed armies so
| much as bands of militias and guerillas, and the line
| between combatant and civilian is entirely transactional.
|
| Total war stopped being a thing once it became certain
| the next one would lead to global nuclear annihilation.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| There's a difference between bombing factories and doing
| firebombing intended to raze the city as a whole.
|
| As Mcnamara himself says in the documentary interview Fog
| of War, proportionality is a concept in warfare.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Empirically no, since Japan didn't surrender after the
| first.
| cykotic wrote:
| From the wikipedia article on the surrender broadcast:
|
| _As many as 1,000 officers and army soldiers raided the
| Imperial Palace on the evening of 14 August 1945 to destroy
| the recording. The rebels were confused by the layout of
| the palace and were unable to find the recordings, which
| had been hidden in a pile of documents. The two phonographs
| were labelled original and copy and successfully smuggled
| out of the palace, the original in a lacquer box and the
| copy in a lunch bag. Major Kenji Hatanaka attempted to halt
| the broadcast at the NHK station but was ordered to desist
| by the Eastern District Army.[2][3]_
|
| Even after two were dropped members of the armed forces
| still wanted the war to continue.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Even after two bombs were dropped, _and_ the Russian
| declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria, _and_ the
| decision of the Emperor!
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| After the coup failed, Hatanaka shot himself. Many others
| did the same, and some were hung following war crimes
| tribunals. These people knew exactly what Japan had done
| under their leadership, and presumably assumed that
| surrender meant death.
| euroderf wrote:
| A book I read way back in the 70s quotes Groves as saying
| that one bomb could be seen as a one-off but two bombs
| would make the Japanese think there's more to come.
| cduzz wrote:
| Did the first one end the war?
|
| Did the second one end the war?
|
| Did the first and second ones prevent the next war?
|
| I'm not sure of the answer to these questions; they're
| obviously important and difficult to answer. The timing
| certainly hints to "no, yes, maybe" but we're not going to
| get a do-over.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The last one seems to be 'for now', but it may not hold.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| But we have had nearly 80 years of peace between major
| powers and that has not happened since there were major
| powers.
|
| Ok you get many indirect wars e.g. Ukraine, Vietnam,
| Korea much in Africa but not ones that could escalate to
| World War levels.
| jacquesm wrote:
| If it doesn't hold we won't be able to continue the
| conversation so I hope that we can extend that 80 years.
| Proxy wars are still wars though, and proxy wars always
| have the possibility of escalation built in to them.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Historically cold war proxy wars were unlikely to
| escalate as even when a major power had troops on the
| ground it was on behalf of another country and also we
| seem to have had sensible leaders.
|
| Ukraine does differ as a major power is involved in its
| own name.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And Russia seems to not have a sensible leader.
| radiator wrote:
| Ukraine definitely does not have a sensible leader. In
| 2021 he declared both that "he does not like the Minsk
| agreements" and that "Ukraine needs to obtain nuclear
| weapons". After the start of the war, he insists that
| Ukraine be allowed to join NATO, which would
| automatically mean World War.
|
| Alright, from his point of view, perhaps this is
| sensible: Ukraine stands to lose otherwise, so for him
| the World War might be preferable.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You're hilarious.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| They used two because they had two different designs, and
| they wanted to test them both on real targets.
|
| They purposely chose purely civilian targets, in order to
| inflict maximal civilian casualties. If this is not morally
| wrong, then nothing is.
| gizajob wrote:
| In your morals perhaps. If you were to run a utilitarian
| calculus, bombing such a target could deliver the most
| morally optimal solution. If the war had not have ended,
| the Japanese could have continued to potentially kill
| millions. The bomb was a clear and final "you cannot win
| if you continue to wage war" that they came to accept.
| The Americans could have as easily dropped it on Tokyo.
| XorNot wrote:
| Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both industrial centres
| involved in the production of war material.
|
| By the technology of the time (precision weapons were
| half a century away), they were absolutely valid targets.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| First, by this argument, literally every urban center is
| a military target. Put another way, it's an argument for
| total war, in which nothing is off limits, and every
| "enemy" civilian is fair game. Is that the world you want
| to live in?
|
| Second, the US did not target any specific industrial
| areas of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In each case, it
| targeted the center of town, with the goal of inflicting
| maximum destruction on the city as a whole.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Not true.
|
| I lean towards it being morally wrong to target civilian
| areas, but to claim ahistorically that the targets were
| intentionally purely civilian is false. Being of military
| importance (military post, arms manufacturing) was a
| requirement of the choice for both cities. Both had
| military significance.
|
| But it was a tragedy. Even if you think the decision to
| drop the bomb was defensible, no one's conscience should
| be at ease when making such a terrible decision even if
| you feel like you're forced by necessity. Which I don't
| think was necessarily the case.
|
| https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-
| civilisatio...
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not military targets, unless
| you define every urban center a military target, by
| virtue of its productive capacity. Once you do that, the
| entire idea of separating civilian and military targets
| becomes an absurdity, and you might as well admit that
| you consider "enemy" civilians to be fair targets.
|
| Historically, the major reason why the US targeted
| Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that the US military wanted to
| test its two bomb designs on large, pristine urban
| centers. Attacking pristine targets made measuring the
| effects of the bombs easier. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki
| had been significant military targets, they likely would
| have been bombed much earlier. In a perverse way, they
| were chosen because they weren't military targets.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Hiroshima wasn't a major industrial or military target:
| there was a military base on the edge of the city, but
| only about 10% of the civilians killed were military
| workers. Nagasaki is a better example, and the bomb did
| hit industrial targets. However, this is mostly an
| accident -- the primary aiming point was the residential
| center of the city. Bad weather forced the crew of Bock's
| Car to choose a secondary target, which happened to be
| located away from the residential center.
| InTheArena wrote:
| This is a simplification that doesn't really work. Japan
| decided as part of their war economy to decentralize
| their war industries to protect them from bombing -
| literally putting furnaces into small urban and rural
| environments rather than centralizing production as all
| the other powers did. This is why they failed to
| accomplish real industrial scaling during the war.
|
| As the old line goes - in jungle fighting, the Japanese
| way of war was to fight in the jungle. The Brit's way of
| war was to go through and around way the jungle. The
| Americans simply leveled the jungle.
|
| That's why the Japanese strategy didn't work. That
| decentralization became a liability even before the
| cities were destroyed and why you can't divide Japanese
| cities into civilian and military targets.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| This is more or less verbatim the justification given in
| US public messaging around the bombing of Japan's cities,
| and it's heavily reiterated by Rhodes. The problem is
| that even if you fully accept the bloody logic of this,
| it wasn't what the Interim committee specified for the
| atomic bomb target list: "the most desirable target would
| be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers
| and closely surrounded by workers' houses." This didn't
| apply to Hiroshima. It did apply to the secondary target
| used in Nagasaki, but not to the primary target. The fact
| that more appropriate targets were passed over in favor
| of (largely unbombed) residential targets is not some
| unfortunate necessity of the war, it was a deliberate
| decision made to show the world how powerful the bomb
| was. That decision might - in the very long run - have
| saved more lives than it took. We should talk about that.
| But we can't talk about it if we're busy fooling
| ourselves.
| jcranmer wrote:
| The question of the role of the atomic bombs in compelling
| Japanese surrender is one that is still debated among
| historians to this day, and will continue to be debated for
| as long as I live.
|
| The indisputable fact is that Japan had thoroughly lost the
| war at that point--it was either losing or had already
| completely lost in every theater. I tend to think that the
| atomic bombs played a big role in the decision to surrender
| in that it showed that the Americans were capable of
| devastating entire cities with a single bomber: air
| defenses are unlikely to score any hits against a single
| bomber unlike a large fleet of bombers carpet bombing
| cities into oblivion, robbing Japan even of the chance to
| die in a blaze of glory.
|
| But this also raises a tricky moral question. The decision
| to end a war is not made by the victor but by the loser.
| What should you do if the loser refuses to admit the loss?
| InTheArena wrote:
| The only slight correction I would add here is that the
| Japanese were not playing to win the war at this point.
| They were simply playing to not lose. Their calculus was
| that they could inflict enough casualties on invading
| forces that any surrender would take into account them,
| continuing the whole China, Korea, and all of the other
| Pacific islands that they had seized. casualties were not
| a bug, they were a feature.
|
| This is what all of the constant debates on hacker news
| failed to take into regard. If you look at the
| correspondence and the commentary of the people making
| decisions, it is quite clear that prior to the atomic
| bombing, the only side that was trying to minimize
| casualties was in fact, the United States. In fact, even
| on the allied side, neither Russia nor the United
| Kingdom, were particularly concerned with minimizing
| casualties. Since Stalin felt that he would gladly trade
| Soviet lives in favor of land that he could hold after
| the war, and the United Kingdom government was determined
| to make an example to justify their occupation of Asia .
|
| It's also worth noting that Nimitz and King, were
| proposing a path that would've led to an order of
| magnitude more death than either an invasion or the
| atomic bombs. A fleet blockade of Japan would've starved
| everyone in Japan.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| By the time the atom bombs were used the 60 or so major
| cities in Japan had been destroyed by the firebombing.
| Whether it was done with one bomber or dozens didn't
| really matter. Japan didn't have the capacity to stop
| either at that point.
|
| On the Japanese side there were multiple factions.
| Everyone in leadership understood the war was lost, but a
| large fraction still had hope of making things costly
| enough for the US to negotiate a conditional surrender
| that preserved the Emperor.
| dboreham wrote:
| Possibly but the idea was to demonstrate that the allies
| had more than one bomb. It might have been possible to just
| make enough fissile material for one weapon, then take
| another 2-3 years to make a second one. In that case if
| you're Japan you don't need to surrender.
| jnwatson wrote:
| The idea was to show that the US had an endless supply.
|
| Of course we only built two, but the Japanese didn't know
| that.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Three
| cduzz wrote:
| Didn't they have the goods for roughly four? Trinity,
| Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the demon core.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Yep, I only counted the ones intended for Japan. The
| demon core was finished a few days before Japan's
| surrender, but never shipped to Tinian base for assembly.
| Iirc they would've been able of making three bombs per
| month.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It was just a matter of time, right? The US had the ocean
| by that point, so presumably we could have just bottled
| them up on their island and then take our time making
| more bombs.
|
| Grim stuff. As horrible as the war was already, glad it
| didn't come to that.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| As someone whose grandfather was fighting in the Pacific,
| looking back sure seems easy to judge but there are no
| guarantees and in the horror that was WWII you don't
| really take risks 'because'. You ensure victory. My
| grandfather was forced to call in flamethrowers on other
| human beings that would not come out of tunnels. He never
| forgave himself for that. Was he a monster? Should he
| have told his supperiors to stall out their plans, maybe
| wait the guys out instead? He was part of the occupation
| and saw the damage the bombs did first hand, helped
| cleanup the damage, but he never doubted the need to end
| the war or the way it was done. But glad you looking back
| figured out a better way by volunteering to let my
| grandfather 'bottle them up'.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wasn't proposing a better method to end the war
| (sieging the island wouldn't have been a tidier or more
| humane end to the war anyway, it would have probably
| involved mass starvation, etc); I was just pointing out
| that "only two" was not really a limit in any practical
| sense, it was at least as many as were needed.
| enkid wrote:
| This is a question with no answer, but even with two parts
| of Japan's military tried to stave a couple to ensure the
| war would continue. Either way, even if dropping the second
| bomb only decreased the likelihood that an invasion of
| Japan was necessary or only shortened the war in China by a
| few months, it was worth it in human lives saved.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I don't know about that. It brought nuclear weapons into
| the world in a way that I'm not sure we could have done
| without. The answer that the question of whether or not
| that was ultimately beneficial will quite possibly not
| stop with the end of World War II, but may well carry
| over into the beginnings of World War III.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Why the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were gravely
| immoral[0].
|
| [0] https://catholicherald.co.uk/ch/weigels-terrible-
| arguments/
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| The US government didn't drop the bomb to avoid a violent
| invasion. They were half-sure they might get an easy
| surrender anyway.
|
| They needed to show the Soviets what they could do. It was
| 100% a demonstration. The Soviets knew about it of course,
| but no one had really seen what it could do.
|
| And if it helped end things early enough that the Soviets
| didn't invade themselves and partition Japan as they were
| already starting to do in Germany, then that was a bonus.
|
| Whether it was morally sound to use it to intimidate Stalin
| is another question entirely, and I don't know what the
| answer is. But let's not pretend that it was some balance
| sheet calculation about how many lives would be lost... it
| was never that.
| underlipton wrote:
| >Once one learns of the other details of the war, and gains
| perspective, it's obvious that it was going to be used.
|
| That doesn't prove that it should have been used. It was also
| not a given even a year earlier. If Henry A. Wallace had
| remained Vice President, it's likely his lack of antagonism
| towards the Soviets would have led him to avoid the show-of-
| force that the bombings were. The moment separating 150,000
| Japanese civilians from life and death is the one where the
| DNC went behind the backs of the American people and chose
| Truman, chip-on-his-shoulder and all, to be FDR's last
| running mate. We're still paying for that bit of hubris.
| wk_end wrote:
| My feeling is that dropping the bomb was overall better than
| a land invasion, but I find the arguments against at least
| giving the Japanese a demonstration of the bomb - even just
| the footage of the Trinty test - beforehand fairly weak.
|
| Yes, it's likely - given the Imperial Japanese military's
| overall disposition - that it wouldn't have been enough to
| cause them to surrender, in which case using the bomb on a
| target would be the next step. And yes, advance notice might
| have made those operations more difficult. But given the
| horror it unleashed on innocent civilians, I think the Allies
| had a moral obligation to try it.
| XorNot wrote:
| In context though the allies didn't see the difference.
| Missing from this account is that Japanese civilians were
| being continuously bombed. More died in the Tokyo
| firebombings then Hiroshima.
|
| There's also the practical problems: how would you do it?
| How would you give the demonstration? How would you deliver
| the tape? And why would Japan believe an enemy claiming to
| have a superweapon? It'd be kind of like North Korea
| sending a film of why the US should now surrender because
| of their new space laser.
| wk_end wrote:
| As I suggested already: whether the Japanese believed
| them or took it seriously is moot. Giving them the
| opportunity to surrender in response to the bomb helps
| shift moral blame onto them.
|
| Whether the Allies cared much or not is also moot in
| terms of _what they should 've done_, morally speaking.
| Clearly my opinion is they didn't care enough. Clearly I
| find the firebombings morally disgraceful as well.
| Clearly, at least some people involved in the decision
| cared a little, as several people did lobby for a
| demonstration. The US also was known to airdrop pamphlets
| encouraging civilian evacuation of cities; civilians
| weren't a total non-concern.
|
| It's not anything like North Korea threatening the US
| with a space laser. For a multitude of reasons: US spy
| capability means they would know well in advance the
| details of any North Korean space laser. North Korea
| isn't an alliance of the most powerful nations in the
| world with leading scientific and military capability.
| And if North Korea did indeed demonstrate a space laser
| that could obliterate a city in a fraction of a second,
| you'd better believe the US would stand up and take
| notice, for that matter.
|
| Moreover, at the time an atomic bomb wasn't science
| fiction. Everyone at that point had known that an atomic
| bomb was possible for decades; both the Germans and the
| Japanese were trying to develop one. Given that, if the
| Americans said, "we've succeeded in developing one and
| intend to use it to destroy your cities unless you
| surrender", along with a demonstration of in action, it
| wouldn't be unthinkable that the Japanese would take it
| seriously - nor would it be particularly different from
| the Potsdam Declaration, which demanded surrender lest
| they face "utter destruction" without any specifics,
| which the Allies did indeed think was worth saying.
|
| Delivering a reel of film would have been
| straightforward; even in total war all communication
| channels aren't cut off. If you want to do a real-world
| demonstration that can be observed, find a place to
| detonate it where it will be observed but will do minimal
| damage. The Manhattan Project involved solving many, many
| problems; this is just another one, and a relatively
| small one at that. When confronted with a problem, you
| figure it out.
| rdevsrex wrote:
| What moral obligation? The same that the Japanese gave the
| Chinese at Nanking?
| cameron_b wrote:
| This is not a throw-away comment. It is exactly why the
| US did not want to face the Japanese on the main island.
| huthuthike wrote:
| The US only had enough material for 3 bombs. It would have
| been a big gamble to drop one on empty land.
| euroderf wrote:
| > My feeling is that dropping the bomb was overall better
| than a land invasion.
|
| Years ago I asked my buddy what was his take on dropping
| the bomb. He answered that when the bombs dropped, his dad
| was in Florida training for the invasion of Japan.
|
| There's no snappy reply to that particular argument.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| How about "it is the Survey's opinion that certainly
| prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior
| to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if
| the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had
| not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been
| planned or contemplated."?
| ant6n wrote:
| Hiroshima still was a war crime.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Uh huh, by which standard that Imperial Japan recognized
| and adhered to?
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| One of my relatives was in Korea staging to invade when
| the bomb dropped. It is very likely a whole branch of my
| family would not exist without the bomb.
| pacija wrote:
| It is also certain that many branches of Japanese
| families do not exist because of the bomb.
| urinotherapist wrote:
| It is also certain that many branches of many families do
| not exist because of the war.
|
| Blame those, who started the war, instead of those, who
| ended it.
|
| Defenders can use anything, including weapons of mass
| destruction, to defend themselves. Attacking to with
| intent to kill even one person is crime.
| aaplok wrote:
| > Defenders can use anything, including weapons of mass
| destruction, to defend themselves.
|
| Not according to the Geneva convention. Targeting
| civilians is a war crime, regardless of who does it.
|
| In many wars, both sides claim to only defend themselves,
| often both sides even claim to have been attacked first.
| Just look at the last few wars fought by the US for
| example. Under such a simplistic moral compass as you
| gave, they'd both feel justified to do anything.
|
| > Attacking to with intent to kill even one person is
| crime.
|
| Dropping an atomic bomb on a civilian center _is_
| attacking with intent to kill.
|
| It is just not so simple.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Do you think Japanese civilians wouldn't have died in
| droves if the US military were forced to take the whole
| of Nippon street by street?
| twirlip wrote:
| I wonder if the horrific aftermath of the atomic bombs
| dropped on Japan prevented later usage of nuclear weapons.
| comprev wrote:
| Have there been any since? I'd say the devastation shocked
| even those who pulled the trigger
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I'm not sure you can differentiate the horror of what
| actually happened in Japan with the existential threat
| posed by the proliferation of thermonuclear devices
| immediately after the war.
|
| If the threat stayed in the small-kiloton range, I think
| we'd very likely have seen them used again -- especially
| if one nation had a monopoly on such weapons.
|
| But that's just a supposition; in the real world, we went
| from "there are two bombs, and we used 'em on Japan" to
| massive proliferation of weapons orders of magnitude
| stronger by opposing superpowers in a really really short
| period of time.
| peyton wrote:
| Yeah, it effectively demonstrated to Stalin we'd have no
| problem dropping it on Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
| colinflane wrote:
| I just finished reading McCarthy's 'Stella Marris' and 'The
| Passenger'. Anyone who enjoyed reading this linked transcript I
| imagine might also appreciate much of the themes treated in
| McCarthy's final works.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Amazing and well worth reading the whole thing.
| lqet wrote:
| > HEISENBERG: [...] I believe this uranium business will give the
| Anglo-Saxons such tremendous power that EUROPE will become a bloc
| under Anglo-Saxon domination. If that is the case it will be a
| very good thing. I wonder whether STALIN will be able to stand up
| to the others as he has done in the past.
|
| [...]
|
| > WIRTZ: It seems to me that the political situation for STALIN
| has changed completely now.
|
| > WEIZSACKER: I hope so. STALIN certainly has not got it yet. If
| the Americans and the British were good Imperialists they would
| attack STALIN with the thing tomorrow, but they won't do that,
| they will use it as a political weapon. Of course that is good,
| but the result will be a peace which will last until the Russians
| have it, and then there is bound to be war.
| hh3k0 wrote:
| > KORSCHING: "I would rather take Swedish nationality than stay
| in GERMANY and wait for the next war. On the other hand I would
| not make any effort to become British. If there is nothing more
| to be made out of GERMANY, one should at anyrate get away from
| RUSSIA."
| legitster wrote:
| I recently listened to the Hardcore History about atomic
| weapons and I hadn't realized how right as WWII ended everyone
| was ready to wage nuclear war against Stalin immediately.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Knowing that US was supplying USSR with weapons,airplanes,
| trucks and helping build entire factories right up until the
| end of the war and then wanted to nuke the same ally is
| really buffling. One one hand can be said, yes they wanted
| USSR to bleed fighting Germany (or do the harder fighting
| part) on the other hand it's just confusing and possibly
| different fractions within US government wanting different
| things.
| legitster wrote:
| It was purely a functional alliance - no more. I don't
| think anyone had any preconceived notions that it was
| anything other than a marriage of convenience.
|
| Keep in mind that Stalin himself professed and acted on the
| belief that coexistence with capitalism was impossible and
| thought that conflict with the West was inevitable within
| 15 years of WWII. We're all lucky that he died before then
| and the cooler head of Khrushchev prevailed.
| dmix wrote:
| The weapon part of the US contribution is way overrated.
|
| The Soviets produced 157k airplanes, the US only gave them
| 11k (7%).
|
| US gave 7k tanks, Soviets produced 87,500 (8%).
|
| The main contribution by the US was support vehicles like
| jeeps and trucks and fuel. Neither the aircraft or tanks
| were very notable beyond the very early years.
|
| The Soviets largely did it on the own armour/aircraft wise.
| Which was why Hitler was so obsessed with invading in the
| first place. He knew unless they rushed to invade Russia
| could unleash it's massive capacity for production that'd
| they'd be impossible to invade on their own, or at a
| minimum be way harder to beat.
| fishtockos wrote:
| > The main contribution by the US was support vehicles
| like jeeps and trucks and fuel
|
| Obviously, these are all absolutely critical. As is the
| aluminum, high-octane avgas, etc that the Soviets
| obtained via Lend-Lease
| hirundo wrote:
| Weizacker wasn't alone in that opinion: [John]
| Von Neumann was, at the time, a strong supporter of "preventive
| war." Confident even during World War II that the Russian spy
| network had obtained many of the details of the atom bomb
| design, Von Neumann knew that it was only a matter of time
| before the Soviet Union became a nuclear power. He predicted
| that were Russia allowed to build a nuclear arsenal, a war
| against the U.S. would be inevitable. He therefore recommended
| that the U.S. launch a nuclear strike at Moscow, destroying its
| enemy and becoming a dominant world power, so as to avoid a
| more destructive nuclear war later on. "With the Russians it is
| not a question of whether but of when," he would say. An oft-
| quoted remark of his is, "If you say why not bomb them
| tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o'clock, I
| say why not one o'clock?"
|
| https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/project...
| jxramos wrote:
| Wow, this Weizsacker fellow predicted the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Conference pretty much?
|
| Sounds like it was this individual
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_von_Weizs%C3%A4...
| lqet wrote:
| His brother was president of Germany from 1984 to 1994. It's
| quite an illustrious family [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weizs%C3%A4cker_family
| [deleted]
| underlipton wrote:
| This reads in some ways like American urbanists discussing
| Chinese infrastructure and the building boom.
| dkarp wrote:
| It's not clear to me if the full transcripts are available here
| but I found the book of transcripts at my college library during
| my studies and found it fascinating.
|
| Looks like you can now buy it on amazon:
| https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Epsilon-Farm-Hall-Transcrip...
| cobaltoxide wrote:
| Of note, these are the translations of the transcripts. The
| original transcripts unfortunately were not preserved.
| netsharc wrote:
| Off-topic: I didn't like the serif font so opened Dev Tools to
| modify the CSS for more comfortable reading. I'm amazed, the page
| is a giant TABLE, it uses BODY BGCOLOR, so a 90's style web
| design. There's CSS being used though.
|
| I guess it's an institute dependant on grants, where they can't
| just blow money on a website redesign...
| Animats wrote:
| Wasn't this on HN last year?
|
| This is just a summary from the day the Germans found out about
| the bomb. The full transcripts are available.[1][2][3]
| Unfortunately, the recordings were not kept. They were not on
| magnetic tape; they were recorded on shellac records. Only the
| interesting parts were transcribed.
|
| The conclusion of the US Alsos mission to investigate the German
| bomb program: _" It was so obvious the whole German uranium set
| up was on a ludicrously small scale. Here was the central group
| of laboratories, and all it amounted to was a little cave, a wing
| of a small textile factory, a few rooms in an old brewery. To be
| sure, the laboratories were well equipped, but compared to what
| we were doing in the United States it was still small-time stuff.
| Sometimes we wondered if our government had not spent more money
| on our intelligence mission than the Germans had spent on their
| whole project."_
|
| [1]
| https://pubs.aip.org/DocumentLibrary/files/publishers/pto/co...
|
| [2]
| https://pubs.aip.org/DocumentLibrary/files/publishers/pto/co...
|
| [3]
| https://pubs.aip.org/DocumentLibrary/files/publishers/pto/co...
| myth_drannon wrote:
| I wouldn't give any importance to those transcripts. They were
| all aware that the captors are bugging them and they were just
| playing the innocent scientists that worked for the sake of
| advancing science and they are not infact proud members of the
| Nazi Party.
| Animats wrote:
| HEISENBERG: _" Microphones installed? (Laughing) Oh, no,
| they're not as cute as all that. I don't think they know the
| real Gestapo methods; they're a bit old fashioned in that
| respect."_ [1], p. 13.
|
| [1]
| https://pubs.aip.org/DocumentLibrary/files/publishers/pto/co...
| bee_rider wrote:
| Although, that is also exactly what you'd say if you were
| trying to manipulate the listeners.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Fascinating how the people that they were discussing were
| having their ear to the wall. It makes you wonder to what
| extent they were doing this because they were aware of being
| eavesdropped on or if they were really so naive as to discuss
| how best to influence the people that they were utterly
| dependent on.
|
| Edit: I've read some more of the transcript and what really
| is interesting is that they are so aloof from the realities
| of the situation they are in. Almost conceited.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| What's important about the recordings is that they were stunned
| at the news about Hiroshima, and declared it impossible.
| Heisenberg's own calculations had predicted a much larger
| critical mass. If they were acting, apparently they're amazing
| actors.
| beebmam wrote:
| > KORSHING: That shows at any rate that the Americans are capable
| of real cooperation on a tremendous scale. That would have been
| impossible in Germany. Each one said that the other was
| unimportant.
|
| Say what you will about the US, and it certainly has its faults,
| but the Americans, both the private sector and public sector,
| have certainly figured out how to coordinate with others towards
| a goal.
|
| The ability to coordinate with others seems like a more valuable
| quality than virtually any other in a serious project, in my
| experience.
| oaktowner wrote:
| I don't disagree with the sentiment, but I do believe that
| Americans ability to cooperate (both with each other in general
| and between the private and public sectors) is not now what it
| was in the mid-20th century.
| credit_guy wrote:
| > HEISENBERG: I don't believe a word of the whole thing. They
| must have spent the whole of their PS500,000,000 in separating
| isotopes; and then it's possible.
|
| How did Heisenberg know with such an accuracy the budget of the
| Manhattan project? Wikipedia states that it was $2.2 billion, and
| the pound/dollar exchange rate during the war was $4.03 for PS1,
| so Heisenberg was less than 10% off.
| jonas21 wrote:
| I assume he read it in the newspaper. It was widely reported
| immediately after the first bomb was dropped that the US had
| spent $2B on it. For example, in the New York Times on Aug 6,
| 1945:
|
| https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general...
| pugworthy wrote:
| I'm surprised to find little information online about Dr. Hans
| Bomke, whom I presume is the "BOMKE" referenced a few times. He
| was not well liked it seems.
|
| I have seen references about a US FBI file on him (Bomke, Hans
| 424771), also that he did do some co-research with Otto Hahn.
|
| Paul Lawrence Rose's book "Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb
| Project" say that the others at Farm Hall considered him a Nazi
| plant.
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